Maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people," I say. "Maybe we're accumulating these new selves all the time.

— Jandy Nelson

Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family. Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.

— Jandy Nelson

Me would like an invisibility cloak to get the hell out of this mess.

— Jandy Nelson

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs.

— Jandy Nelson

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and I have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

— Jandy Nelson

My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier. Because I imagined it.

— Jandy Nelson

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.

— Jandy Nelson

No I contradict myself. Picasso he does too. He says pull out your brain, yes, he also says, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing.' And Michelangelo, he says he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything IA true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.

— Jandy Nelson

Nor that he's regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We're two paintings staring at each other across a room.

— Jandy Nelson

People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing.

— Jandy Nelson